When boy-meets-girl met the Millennials, conventional wisdom says, pop culture’s longtime love affair with the generic romantic comedy came to an end. You know the old rom-com formula: A boy and a girl meet serendipitously, their obvious chemistry is prolongedly undermined by either mutual hatred or social barriers, and by the 90-minute-mark we see a happy ending and final, passionate embrace. The frequency with which the same old storyline is used is only ever matched by the frequency with which the same stars are, too.

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The sameness might be why so many people have said the rom com is dying. There are still a lot of movies both romantic and funny that don’t quite fit into the genre. They feature bros (Neighbors), lesbians (The Kids Are All Right), parents (Sex Tape), Friends With Benefits, and zombies (Warm Bodies). The diversity of portrayals may be meant to appeal to Millennials, the teens-through-thirties set that makes up much of Hollywood’s target audience.

So why is it that this summer’s romantic comedy for Millennials, What If, is so generic? The film features a bunch of twee Gen Y stock characters—including Daniel Radcliffe as Wallace, a parent’s nightmare (a med-school dropout who lives in his aunt’s attic), and Zoe Kazan as Chantry, a chronic overachiever and artistic animator. But it’s also a story that reboots the Hollywood rom com of old. Wallace and Chantry meet. They have obvious chemistry. Chantry is involved with someone else. They pledge to be friends. And we ask, once more, “Can men and women be just friends?”

The question might seem outdated in an era in which the pair could just start cashing in on their Benefits. But What If proves the traditional formula still resonates, with a slight modification: by portraying that old rom-com standby, true love, as a lifestyle choice.

What If borrows most of its premise from the decidedly optimistic 1989 Rob Reiner genre installment When Harry Met Sally. There’s the Just Friends pact sealed early on in the film, the ensuing romantic walks in the park, the passing of the seasons, and the growing frustration that these two characters should just get on with it already. But Reiner’s film took place in New York City, the magical movie setting where one-time acquaintances run into each other in airports. What If, on the other hand, situates its characters in Toronto, which is where so many mainstream films are actually shot these days. That the movie forgoes its genre’s glamorous hometown in the name of scoring some government subsidies speaks to its fundamental economic realism.

In similarly practical fashion, when the movie begins our characters are in different places both professionally and romantically, but suffering from the same classic Millennial crisis: finding the perfect work-life balance. Wallace, who was headed for domestic bliss as med-school student with a serious girlfriend, dropped it all when he found her cheating on him with a professor. Chantry is just a few steps behind: Her stable life with a successful boyfriend has her turning down promotions at her job so the couple can stay together, but he’s seeking positions abroad. It’s bound to fail.

Wallace and Chantry’s romance defies the idealized careerism of the classic rom com, in which professional aspirations and personal ones miraculously align. Neither character appears to have a particularly stable income, so their relationship isn’t pragmatic, and it doesn’t make for easy viewing: “I don’t know about anything,” Chantry confesses at one pivotal moment, when a passionate kiss and swelling orchestral score might have been more appropriate. The tension between stability and love is one faced made by many a real person, and especially many a real Millennial. This is a generation, after all, opting for personal fulfillment over profit.

If this all sounds a bit unromantic, What If certainly shows true love is difficult. For this boy and girl, falling hard for someone is a choice rather than a destiny. These lovers are strategic, not starry-eyed—a fact that helps the film avoid the treacle that Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler sent up with this summer’s all-out genre satire, We Came Together. That film mocked tropes so antiquated that, as Andrew Romano noted in The Daily Beast, people under 30 might not even get the comedy.

These young lovers are strategic, not starry-eyed.

In fact, for Millennials who have grown up in the era of the dead or dying rom com, fanciful escapist storylines are fairly uncommon. Grit is in. The self-aware, sick-kids-in-love story The Fault in Our Stars has racked up $123 million at the box office this summer, and The Hollywood Reporter is already calling the “grounded” teen movie an upstart movement for a new era. These new developments point to a healthy change of events: Movies aimed at young people might now actually have an earnest interest in helping them to navigate their own lives.

That’s not to say that What If is a weepy funkiller. The movie is actually quite funny as it mocks, lovingly, the rom com’s sappiest tropes. The Meet Cute, for instance, is more of a Meet Creepy; The Grand Romantic Gesture a humiliating, cringe-inducing fail. But the audience doesn’t have to be well-versed in the rom com to get the joke. These aren’t deliberate shots at the old films so much as they are appeals to the timeless nature of awkward courtship.

In fact, if What If succeeds, it will speak to the formula’s subtle genius for reinvention with the times. Boy-meets-girl was born in The Great Depression and grew darker and more sexually frank in the lean period from World War II to the ‘70s. Happy endings returned for the ‘80s and ‘90s; the early 2000s were what Christopher Orr called the "profitable doldrums." The genre took a hit during the Great Recession like most of the rest of us, but it isn’t dead yet: This generation’s financial slump may prove to be its latest salvation.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

Jim Gilmore joins the race, and the Republican field jockeys for spots in the August 6 debate in Cleveland.

After decades as the butt of countless jokes, it’s Cleveland’s turn to laugh: Seldom have so many powerful people been so desperate to get to the Forest City. There’s one week until the Republican Party’s first primary debate of the cycle on August 6, and now there’s a mad dash to get into the top 10 and qualify for the main event.

With former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore filing papers to run for president on July 29, there are now 17 “major” candidates vying for the GOP nomination, though that’s an awfully imprecise descriptor. It takes in candidates with lengthy experience and a good chance at the White House, like Scott Walker and Jeb Bush; at least one person who is polling well but is manifestly unserious, namely Donald Trump; and people with long experience but no chance at the White House, like Gilmore. Yet it also excludes other people with long experience but no chance at the White House, such as former IRS Commissioner Mark Everson.